Enrollment numbers are entered as reported to us by directors of institutional research or registrars. Users should note that the MLA surveys count course enrollments, not students. A student may be enrolled in more than one language course. A graduate student enrolled in an undergraduate course is counted as an undergraduate enrollment.

During the fifty-five-year span of the surveys, there have been changes in methodology, inclusion of new categories, language and institutional name changes, and other variations.

Names of languages are entered as reported to us in each survey. Because a language or variant may appear under different names—as with Chinese, Mandarin, and Cantonese or Yupic and Yup'ik—users may wish to open the link to Add Related Languages, when it appears, or select from the full list of languages. Language variants or different course names may produce enrollment listings that must be searched separately but might usefully be considered together, as in the case of Filipino, Pilipino, and Tagalog or Ancient Greek, Biblical Greek, and Koine Greek.

Some institutions have had more than one name or have changed status over time. Our records list institutions under the name they held at the time of each survey. For institutions that had name or status changes (e.g., from two-year to four-year or the reverse or merged or closed), an “i” appears next to the name after a search is done. Scrolling over the “i” or the institution name will bring up information about these changes. Related institutions are linked. A search for an institution that changed its name will bring up enrollments under the names it had at the time of the selected surveys. For example, Arkansas College was renamed Lyon College in 1994; a search for Lyon College French enrollments in the 1972 survey will bring up Arkansas College enrollments.

A list of the most commonly used abbreviations in the survey is available here.

Some information about institutions and languages may not be available for all surveys.

The breakdown between lower- and upper-level undergraduate enrollments is only available for 2006, 2009, and 2013 and only for searches by state and by institution, not for searches for the entire United States.

Data disaggregated by institution, by state, or by enrollment level may not be available for all languages or all survey years before 1974.

Some surveys are anomalous. For example, the 1969 and 1971 surveys treat summer rather than fall enrollments. The 1972 survey aggregated all four-year language enrollments other than Ancient Greek, French, German, Italian, Latin, Russian, and Spanish under “Other Languages.” More information on aggregated enrollments is available here.

Aggregated enrollments can be found in the data set by searching the University field for “Aggregated LCTLS,” “Aggregated CTLS,” or “Aggregated CTLS & LCTLS” (where “CTLS” stands for commonly taught languages, and “LCTLS” stands for less commonly taught languages). They are distinguished by year and institutional level.

Two other features also cannot be accessed on the Web site and require a download of the data set: the zero enrollments field (which indicates the institutions that had no enrollments in any language) and the nonrespondents field (which indicates the institutions that did not respond to the survey). Both of these features are available for the 2009 and 2013 surveys only.